Determinants of Farms’ Antibiotic Consumption – a Longitudinal Study of Pig Fattening Farms
60 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2022
Abstract
As high antibiotic consumption in livestock production poses risks to public health, Germany has implemented a monitoring system to decrease farm animal use. Data from 2,013 German pig farms are used to describe prescription trends for different antibiotic classes between Autumn 2017 and Autumn 2019. A Tobit model with instrumental variables is implemented to identify determinants of antibiotic consumption among farm, farmer, and county characteristics as well as weather variables. The overall quantity of prescribed antibiotics has been stable with seasonal fluctuations and a shift away from critically important antibiotics used. Biosecurity factors such as the all-in/all-out system, livestock farm density and pigs per farm are shown to be important drivers of antibiotic consumption. In addition, the number of cold days within a season increases antibiotic consumption but precipitation and the number of hot days have no significant effect.
Keywords: critically important antibiotics, demand management, pigs, treatment incidence, weather
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